My Father’s Secret Past
And how it shaped my own search for my Jewish identity.
By Joshua Kendall
... my late father, a Romanian-born Jew, used to enjoy singing German songs in the shower. As a kid, I had no idea what the words meant. But after I began studying German in college ... I figured out that among his favorites was “das Horst Wessel Lied” ...
My late mother, a first-generation American and a housewife, was also Jewish; her father, an immigrant from Poland, was a rabbi. Yet my father managed to ban virtually anything to do with the Jewish religion—say, a copy of the Haggadah—from our Upper East Side apartment. My mother’s niece once asked my father about our plans for Passover, and he turned both white and mute. At his insistence, our family celebrated Christmas ...
... When I was little, he used to tell me he was Catholic. When I was in my early teens, he let it slip out that both his parents had been Jewish and had converted to Christianity around the time of his birth in 1925. And that’s when I learned that he had been forced to erase his Jewishness in order to survive the Holocaust ...
My father once told me that one of the reasons he married my mother was that she was WASP-y on the outside and Jewish on the inside; with her blue eyes and light complexion, she did not “look Jewish.” Somewhere deep within, there was a part of him that identified as Jewish, but he felt that he would put himself in danger if he showed it to the world ...
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/family/2016/06/my_father_secret_past_and_my_search_for_my_jewish_identity.html
